Today, the ancients throw down a challenge, and
we're hard-pressed to meet it. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.

The ancient Egyptians
surprise us again and again with their scale of
building. Take the obelisk, a long tapered monolith
topped with a small pyramidal cap and inscribed
with hieroglyphs honoring the gods and telling of
kings who lived in its shadow.

The Washington Monument is shaped like an obelisk,
but it has stone facing on a steel skeleton. A true
obelisk is a single piece of stone. From 2300 to
1300 BC, the Egyptians cut and erected dozens of
monster obelisks. Some were over 100 feet high and
reached weights of 500 tons -- as much as a small
cargo ship.

Yet, after they were quarried, obelisks had to be
moved and lifted into position. The Egyptians did
that over and over again; later generations seldom
tried. Bern Dibner tells how a few Roman Caesars
moved big obelisks. They even hauled them across
the Mediterranean. They carried a 370-ton obelisk
in a ship powered by 300 oarsmen. Much later, in
1586, an Italian engineer made modern history by
relocating that same obelisk to the square in front
of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

After the English took Egypt from Napoleon, they
took an interest in two 200-ton obelisks that'd
first been erected at Heliopolis 3500 years ago.
Caesar Augustus had them moved to Alexandria just
before the birth of Christ. In 1819 Egypt told
England they could have one. It took 58 years and
the development of ocean steamers before England
could claim it. They finally built a huge
cylindrical barge ship called the
Cleopatra.

It took weeks to load the obelisk into the
Cleopatra. Then the steamer
Olga towed it away. When a storm rose
in the Bay of Biscay, the Cleopatra
began heeling over. Six seamen drowned trying to
set it right. The Olga's captain
thought Cleopatra was lost. He cut her
loose and fled. Another ship found the floating
obelisk and brought that eerie prize to England for
salvage. Today, it stands on the Thames River
embankment.

William Vanderbilt hired Civil War veteran Henry
Gorringe to move the companion obelisk from Egypt
to New York. Gorringe took a large ship to
Alexandria and put it in dry dock there. He cut a
huge hole in the hull near the bow and loaded the
obelisk into it. It took him a year and a
50-percent cost overrun to wrestle it into place in
Central Park. And there it stands today.

But the Romans did all that without steam power,
and the Egyptians before them carved and moved
those stones without even gears or power screws.
However, the ancient Egyptians did have something
beyond raw muscle. They used the three things that
underlie any great technology to move those stones:
cooperation, inventive genius -- and a powerful
will to succeed.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.

(Theme music)

Dibner, B., Moving the Obelisks,
Norwalk, CT, Burndy Library, 1991.

Image courtesy of the Burndy
Library, Dibner Institute for the History of
Science and Technology

Obelisk moved to Alexandria by the Romans (from
Moving the Obelisks)

Image courtesy of the Burndy
Library, Dibner Institute for the History of
Science and Technology

Loading an obelisk through a hole in the steamship
Dessoug
(from Moving the Obelisks)

Image courtesy of the Burndy
Library, Dibner Institute for the History of
Science and Technology

The pontoon ship Cleopatra being
abandoned by the ship Olga
(from Moving the Obelisks)

Image courtesy of the Burndy
Library, Dibner Institute for the History of
Science and Technology